Zoologist known as the ‘Indiana Jones of wildlife protection’

Alan Rabinowitz, a zoologist who overcame a debilitating stutter to become a powerful voice for leopards, jaguars and other wild cats threatened by humans, died Aug. 5 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 64.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement from Panthera, a wild-cat conservation organization that he co-founded in 2006 and, until recently, led as chief executive. Dr. Rabinowitz had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2001.

As a child with a severe stutter, Rabinowitz spent much of his free time playing on the floor of his bedroom closet, where he secluded himself with “a little menagerie” of pet chameleons, snakes, turtles and hamsters - “the only living beings around me that seemed to listen but not judge.”

Rabinowitz went on to conquer his speech disorder and become “the Indiana Jones of wildlife protection,” as Time magazine once called him, braving 500-mile hikes through the wilderness, vampire bats, attacks of leeches and malaria, and a plane crash in the jungle, to preserve wild cats from Latin America to Southeast Asia.

At the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he worked for nearly three decades before moving to Panthera full time in 2008, Rabinowitz gained international renown for his research on jaguars, tigers, rhinos, bears, raccoons, leopards, leopard cats and civets.

In Belize, his work was credited with spurring the creation of the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, the world’s first jaguar preserve; in Myanmar, he discovered a deer known as the leaf muntjac - “an animal so tiny that hunters wrap it in a single, albeit ample, leaf from a tropical plant,” according to the New York Times.

In recent years, he linked the world’s declining populations of big cats to the rise of infectious diseases such as SARS, West Nile virus and Ebola, saying that these apex predators “stabilize and help balance the ecological food webs to which they belong.”

But Rabinowitz also “went beyond the science,” said biologist and conservationist George Schaller, to convince foreign governments and local populations of the importance of protecting animals, especially those that are seen as a nuisance, threat or a lucrative source of fur.

“Nobody goes to Belize, or anywhere else, and establishes a reserve - you convince the government to establish it. That takes a certain political sense,” said Schaller, who serves as vice chair of Panthera’s science council. “It takes passionate people like Alan to be on the ground in these countries, sometimes for several years, to reach the trust of the government and convince them to protect something. And that’s not what you train for as a scientist.”

Rabinowitz successfully pressed the military leaders of Myanmar, also known as Burma, to create the world’s largest tiger reserve, a sanctuary in the Hukawng Valley nearly as large as Vermont. He said his work was actually easier “in communist countries and in dictatorships than in democracies,” where he was often frustrated by slow-moving agencies and bureaucratic red tape. “I find that most of these dictators - they’re not nice people, and I’m not an apologist for the ones I work with, but I will do anything I can to save animals,” he said in a 2008 appearance on “The Colbert Report.”

Rabinowitz also helped create the largest nature preserve in Taiwan; drew international attention to tigers in Thailand, where the United Nations added a wildlife sanctuary to its World Heritage list in 1991; and, in the Himalayan mountains of Bhutan, identified a previously unknown population of high-altitude tigers.